Description:

The last half of the 19th century was for Yucatan, like much of the Atlantic World, a time of extreme tumult. Having recently gained its independence from Spain, the fledgling nation found itself plunged into numerous violent, political conflicts. None had so lasting an impact as the Maya Social War (or, Caste War of Yucatan; 1847-1901). Among the most successful anticolonial, Indigenous insurrections to have been mounted in the Americas, this war transformed the peninsula.

Since 2013, I’ve collaborated with predominantly Yucatec Maya community members from the historic parish where the conflict began. In this talk, I’ll focus on the roads (caminos antiguos) we encountered during our regional surveys. I approach these jungle trails as Indigenous infrastructures constantly unsettling the geospatial erasure of Maya communities imposed on the region through colonial cartographic practices.

Coupled with oral histories and archival research, our research is beginning to show how Yucatan’s southeastern Maya communities have relied on these caminos antiguos to assert and maintain autonomy in a space that in Yucatecan settler colonial discourse has typically been characterized as unruly, untraversable jungle. These montes despoblados (unsettled jungles) represent Maya cultural landscapes and environs from within which the Maya Social War was fought, and Maya sovereignty continues to be imagined and performed. I argue that as the war transitioned into a separatist movement to reclaim Maya sovereignty across southern Yucatan, insurrectionists engaged in crucial infrastructural projects like trail maintenance that undermined state attempts at regaining control in the region and offered alternatives—however short-lived— to the Iberian-inherited settler colonial system they were working against.

Bio: Dr. Tiffany C. Fryer is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan where she is also assistant curator in their Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. She co-founded the U-M Center for Community Archaeology and Heritage and serves as faculty in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. After finishing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, she held a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows for the Liberal Arts at Princeton. She maintains various ongoing projects but her principal field research takes place in Quintana Roo, Mexico where she co-facilitates

the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project. Her teaching and writing focus on museums, cultural heritage, and collective memory; colonialism and political violence; and praxis and politics in historical archaeology and anthropology. She is working on a book project tentatively titled Things of War: Conflict & Heritage on Mexico's Maya Frontier.